After I reflected on the debut album here, I deemed it silly that I never got around to picking up the third and fourth albums from Franz Ferdinand. Thankfully, living in a rich library environment, this was quickly remedied and then a couple months later, here's one of them!
I haven't spent a whole lot of time with this album (full title Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, but I got lazy with the post title...you get the point), so I can't really get into any kind of detailed analysis. It was released nearly four years after You Could Have It So Much Better and it's clear that the band had gone back to the drawing board to correct some of the overt flaws of that album. The second album was released so quickly after the debut it had a feel of being a crop of largely inferior bonus tracks. Tonight takes the initiative of making progressive musical changes while getting back much of the tight pop that made the first album so good. So while the album is in a lot of ways a return to form, they are also breaking new ground, with a tasteful amount of keyboards and computers added to the mix. And for those who really want to get crazy, there's the dub remix album (Blood) the redoes almost all of the tracks to the point of non-recognition.
Another four years would elapse between this album and the next one. The next album definitely curtails the electronica bits of Tonight, but still retains the tightness of the music, so all in all it seems like the band is on the right path, even if they aren't pumping out albums annually.
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